Travel books

James Owen enjoys a reissued series focusing on Central Asia. Plus more book reviews.

Between 1980 and the mid-1990s, Peter Hopkirk published half a dozen books whose theme was one of the most romantic in history: the 19th-century struggle for mastery of Central Asia.

Now that the region is back in the headlines, the publisher John Murray has taken the opportunity to reissue the series as handsome paperbacks (albeit with photographs crammed too tightly into the gutter).

What strikes one on reading these works again is how little things have changed, not merely in the quarter century since the first was written but in the 200 years since Hopkirk's connecting motif, "the Great Game", began.

Technology may have changed the face of most of the planet, and the Russian stranglehold on the area may have been largely broken, but Central Asia remains as remote, contrary and coveted as ever. Afghanistan is still a natural refuge for terrorists, vast swathes of land are again dominated by dictatorial rulers and oil riches attract adventurers as ambitious as any of Hopkirk's heroes. Few of us can see the region except through the prism of exoticism.

Hopkirk's books are firmly in this tradition, less political analysis than highly coloured and eminently readable celebrations of the inspirations for Greenmantle and Kim, Newbolt and Henty. His masterpiece is The Great Game (1990), a phrase popularised by Kipling but coined by one of the struggle's victims, the British officer Arthur Conolly, who was beheaded as a spy by the Emir of Bokhara in 1842.

Conolly had been a participant in the struggle between expansionist Tsarist Russia and Imperial Britain for control of the approaches to India, a canvas for intelligence work that ranged from the Caucasus to the Chinese frontier, from the Kazakh steppe to the Khyber Pass. Combining records from the India Office with the long-forgotten memoirs of the Game's protagonists, Hopkirk wrote what was in effect a history of the first Cold War.

Two other books in the series continued the tale. Setting the East Ablaze (1984) concerns Lenin's efforts to infect Asia with Communism after the Russian Revolution, while On Secret Service East of Constantinople (1994) describes similar German schemes to undermine the Oriental empires of both Britain and Russia during the First World War. The latter contains the story of Hopkirk's greatest coup, the revelation after the death in 1988 of a seemingly innocuous retired officer named Ronald Sinclair that he was in fact Reginald Teague-Jones, a key player in the Game, who had been hunted by the KGB for 70 years.

Trespassers on the Roof of the World (1982) is an encapsulation of the allure that the closed realms of Central Asia had, and still have, for outsiders. It deals with one of the most tragic episodes of the imperial contest, the decision by India's Viceroy, Lord Curzon, forcibly to open the forbidden kingdom of Tibet to British influence in the mistaken belief that Russia was on the point of taking control of it.

Foreign Devils on the Silk Road (1980), meanwhile, relates the exploits of Sven Hedin and Aurel Stein, the Indiana Joneses who appropriated the cultural treasures of Central Asia for the museums of Europe, while Quest for Kim (1996), the slightest of Hopkirk's works, tracks down the locations and the people who inspired Kipling's novel, which in turn sparked Hopkirk's fascination with the Great Game.

All are beguiling guides to the past attempts of superpowers to meddle in Central Asia, and a reminder of the uncertain outcome of present efforts. What remains to be written is a history of what those on the receiving end of such intervention made of it all. James Owen

It's six decades since the essayist Rebecca West published her seminal Balkan travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and Tony White is setting out to retrace her footsteps through the fractured former Yugoslavia.

At least, that's what it says on the cover. In reality, as the writer of this somewhat muddled book eventually explains: "I'd decided early on to understand my self-imposed brief very loosely, and not to follow Rebecca West too closely, if at all."

In place of an itinerary, White offers random observations on multiple visits, ranging from teenage backpacking to a hosted writers' tour in 2005. Consequently he takes in Slavonia, Zagreb, Belgrade and Split, but conspicuously misses Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro. Undeniably passionate about the region, he rightly warns against "exotic" or over-simplified portrayals of its "fractal" history. But reading this book is like rummaging through one of the author's beloved flea-markets.

There are unexpected gems, such as his snapshot of street children diving for coins in a Zagreb fountain, the redolent smells and tastes of Balkan cuisine, or the revelation of the cult status afforded to Only Fools and Horses. And in otherwise uneventful meanderings between cafés and hotel rooms, the author offers some meaty critiques on art and literature. Less three-dimensional, however, are the people. Despite days spent with fellow writers, he's almost halfway through the book before he introduces any of them properly to his readers.

White never claims to be definitive - and he's certainly no fool. His mistake - or perhaps his publisher's - is to try to shoehorn what is essentially a modest collection of musings and anecdotes into the mould of literary pilgrimage. If it's memorable travel you're after, better to read West herself. Nick Thorpe

Nick Thorpe is author of 'Adrift in Caledonia: Boat-hitching for the Unenlightened' (Little Brown, £12.99)

'You've seen the film, now visit the set" is the latest slogan from the Travel Industry Association of America. In some cases, it could prove counter-productive. The original King Kong, for example, might have been set in and filmed in Los Angeles and New York, but Peter Jackson's remake was shot entirely in New Zealand. His "1930s New York" is a city he built on vacant land in Wellington; "Skull Island" home of the great ape, is Lyall Bay, one of New Zealand's most popular surfing beaches.

It's a tricky thing, film tourism, so buy The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations before you book an expensive pilgrimage. Reeves's book, which has just been revised and expanded, is sufficiently fresh to have all the details on the new Kong locations, and he adds updates and corrections on a website (www.movie-locations.com). He needs to: no sooner had he taken photographs of two buildings in Los Angeles - the Hawthorne Grill, held up by Hunny-Bunny and Pumpkin in Pulp Fiction, and the Ambassador Hotel, which featured in both A Star Is Born (1937) and Tony Scott's True Romance (1993) - than both were torn down. Take a look while you can is his advice.

Reeves covers the world in 460 pages. Richard Alleman, in New York: The Movie Lover's Guide and Hollywood: The Movie Lover's Guide (Broadway Books, about £8 each online), devotes 300 pages to each destination. There's no shortage of guided tours in either, but with Alleman's books you can organise your own tour at your own pace, whether it's to gawp at the Hollywood house where Barbara Stanwyck seduced Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, or to eat in the New York deli where Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally.

Sights range from cinemas to cemeteries. He covers television, too, so if you want to find the home of the Soprano family, he'll point you in the right direction. Just remember that the real owners are no more likely than Tony Soprano to welcome uninvited visitors. Michael Kerr

If you think you know Italy, if you think you know D H Lawrence, but haven’t read Etruscan Places, think again. This is not the Tuscany of potted lemon trees against the pink stucco of renovated villas, nor the overheated Lawrence of Women in Love or Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

It was April 1927. Lawrence had recently discovered he was dying of TB. His wife, Frieda, was seeing another man. To console himself he set off with an old friend on a tour of Etruscan tombs in various small towns near the Tyrrhenian coast. The result was the most serene and unstrained of all his books. Moving between the Fascist present and the Roman past, between the boy who drives him and his friend across the low, windy hills in a pony cart and the mysterious dancers of the Etruscan tomb paintings, Lawrence wonderfully imagines the Etruscan way of life and how it persists in modern Tuscany.

Crawling into one burial chamber after another with a guide and a couple of candles, he creates a wry and beautiful tale that is also the starting point, we understand, for his own last journey to a place about which no travel literature can ever be written. Tim Parks